Steve Keen's Debtwatch http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs
Analysing the Collapse of the Global Debt BubbleThu, 30 Jul 2015 04:52:30 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.6Help make Minsky easier to usehttp://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/30/help-make-minsky-easier-to-use/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/30/help-make-minsky-easier-to-use/#commentsThu, 30 Jul 2015 04:52:30 +0000http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/?p=9586 Continue reading → ]]>I’ve just put A$10,000 of my own money towards improving Minsky, the Open Source program I have designed to enable economists to create dynamic and monetary models of the economy. If you support the work I’m doing to help economics escape its 19th century equilibrium fetish, please consider also making a donation to Minsky’s development via Dr Russell Standish’s PayPal account (or via direct debit, using the account details you’ll find below):

Keep Russell Standish on the Minsky Project

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Minsky has been programmed almost exclusively by Dr Russell Standish, and $10,000 will buy 100 hours of Russell’s programming time. About A$230,000 has been spent on it so far–with US$128,000 coming from an initial INET grant (when the US$ was worth less than the A$), US$78,000 from a Kickstarter campaign, and sundry other amounts from supporters like Bruce Ramsay, who runs the Ending Overlending page that is linked to from this blog. This funding enabled Russell to build the basic functionality Minsky needed, along with a lot of innovative “smarts” that set it apart from its much more established rivals in system dynamics–programs like Matlab’s Simulink, Vensim, Stella and Vissim that cost thousands of dollars a copy and have been around for decades.

For example, Minsky is the only system dynamics program that lets you use Greek characters and symbols, superscripts and subscripts; it runs plots dynamically while a simulation is running (which only Vissim also does in the system dynamics product space), it’s the only program that lets you insert variables and operators by typing directly onto the canvas rather than having to use the mouse and toolbox palettes; and of course it’s the only program that supports double-entry bookkeeping to allow complex inter-related financial accounts to be simulated dynamically.

But the program is still incomplete. Some basic things like an IF/THEN/ELSE block are missing; some aspects of grouping don’t work properly yet, you can’t save part of a Minsky file as a toolkit, and so on. I’m putting $10,000 of my own cash in to get these things done now–and there are many other features that should be added. These range from simple things like adding shortcut keys for “Save As” to the final ambitions I have for the program–enabling it to model multiple sectors and multiple economies at once.

If we can raise another $30,000 or so, we can also address one of the main complaints that I hear about Minsky: to quote my good friend Tom Ferguson, INET’s Research Director, from our dinner together in London last month, “Why is Minsky so hard to use?”.

As I told Tom over dinner, part of the reason is that economists have almost no experience with system dynamics software.

This was comically illustrated by Noah Smith’s question to me “Tell me what the ‘wires’ do in the tool?” on Twitter about two years ago, when Minsky’s development had just begun: like most economists, Noah had apparently never seen system dynamics software before, and thought I had invented the idea of using “wires” to layout equations visually (and he thought I’d made a logical error too, though I must say Noah seems to have cottoned on to dynamic modelling since). Engineers find using Minsky easy, because the flowchart metaphor for equation design has dominated engineering now for over 3 decades.

But the other part of why Minsky is “so hard to use” is that “so little money has gone into its development”. There’s just over one man-year’s worth of coding in Minsky, so in some ways it’s amazing that it does anything useful at all–let alone enough to win SourceForge’s “Program of the Month” award back in January 2014. My original application to INET asked for US$250,000; I received US$128,000; with that money expended, Minsky just worked but had lots of bugs and many incomplete features. With the additional $100,000 raised from the public since, it now works reasonably well, still has some bugs, but needs lots more features to be complete. Additional money from you now will help add some desirable “ease of use” features–such as direct entry of equations, laying out causal loops prior to building a model, better graphics, exporting models in vector graphics formats for documentation, etc. An absolute bomb of funding–if some hedge fund out there that uses my economic ideas (you know who you are) decides to give something back–will enable data importing, fitting models to data using nonlinear parameter estimation techniques, and so on.

So please, if you’ve read this far, and you support what Minsky is trying to achieve–giving economics the capacity to build realistic monetary, dynamic models of the economy–then go that little bit further and make a donation via this widget, or via direct credit into Russell’s accounts using the info in my invoice below:

Keep Russell Standish on the Minsky Project

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]]>http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/30/help-make-minsky-easier-to-use/feed/4Death of a Great Australian: Hugh Stretton 1924–2015http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/23/death-of-a-great-australian-hugh-stretton-1924-2015/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/23/death-of-a-great-australian-hugh-stretton-1924-2015/#commentsThu, 23 Jul 2015 02:57:32 +0000http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/?p=9580 Continue reading → ]]>The great polymath and humanitarian Hugh Stretton died this weekend. I can do no better than to reproduce another great Australian’s tribute to him.

Hugh died last Saturday at the age of 91 after a long illness. I had known him since 1958 when I first came to Adelaide where he was the much-admired Professor of History. In later years we became firm friends, though I continued to regard him with awe and admiration. He was a giant intellect, easily Australia’s most deep and progressive thinker, and a remarkably kind and humane man who lived up to his ideals in many practical ways.

Having established an excellent History department, he resigned from his chair so that he could write. The first product of this new phase was The Political Sciences, published by Routledge in 1969, and named in the Times Literary Supplement as a work of ‘near genius’. It contains a most profound analysis of the inseparability of analysis and ideology in the social sciences. He published privately his ground-breaking book, Ideas for Australian Citiesin 1970, which then became a bestseller. Housing and Government, his Boyer Lectures, were published in 1974. His Cambridge University Press book, Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment, (1976), was so far ahead of its time that it has not received the attention it should have. His volumes of essays analyse vital social, political and economic issues in Australian society. His ‘anti-Samuelson’ economics textbook, Economics: A New Introduction (1999), presents to students a viable alternative to mainstream economics.

Most of all, he was a loving and lovable person, always extraordinarily generous and supportive to his many friends and admirers (overlapping sets), and lovingly supportive and proud of his children. He and Pat had many years of deep love and support for one another. I doubt that we shall see his like again.

Geoff Harcourt Professor Emeritus G C Harcourt School of Economics, UNSW Business School

I didn’t know Hugh personally, but he generously wrote a cover blurb for the first edition of Debunking Economics, and we corresponded briefly at the time. I felt privileged at the time, and saddened now that he is gone.

Hugh had a wisdom that is lacking on both ends of the political spectrum today. My favourite Strettonism (which I’m sure I heard via Geoff Harcourt) was his gentle retort to a particularly left-wing employee of the South Australian Housing Trust, who asserted that there should be no private housing at all–just public housing.

Hugh replied “No, we need them to keep us efficient, and they need us to keep them honest”.

Would that we had such perspective in today’s polarized and trivialized political debate.

]]>http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/23/death-of-a-great-australian-hugh-stretton-1924-2015/feed/2Help Renegade Inc. get over the line in the next 70 hourshttp://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/19/help-renegade-inc-get-over-the-line-in-the-next-70-hours/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/19/help-renegade-inc-get-over-the-line-in-the-next-70-hours/#commentsSat, 18 Jul 2015 21:50:59 +0000http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/?p=9574 Continue reading → ]]>Renegade Inc., the media group that produced the Four Horsemen documentary about the financial crisis, is running a Kickstarter Campaign to raise US$45,000 to underwrite its next documentary.

The Four Horsemen documentary has been an independent media success, with over three million views on YouTube. It has also shown at more than three hundred Q and A sessions in seventeen countries. Ross and Megan Ashcroft, the principals of Renegade Inc., want to produce a documentary for the post-crisis–or rather permanent crisis–world in which we now live. They also plan to follow this up with an independent media platform, to give the public something other than the superficial pap that dominates the media coverage of economics, politics and culture today.

All they need as seed capital is $45,000, and with 70 hours to go they’re almost there–just another $9,000 to go in the next 70 hours. You can pledge as little as $25 or as much as $5,000 (I’ve pledged $500). So if you care about the world enough to read a blog post like this, follow up with a donation to help establish an alternative media voice on economics, politics and culture.

]]>http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/19/help-renegade-inc-get-over-the-line-in-the-next-70-hours/feed/0Will We Crash Again? (FT/Alphaville Presentation)http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/09/will-we-crash-again-ftalphaville-presentation/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/09/will-we-crash-again-ftalphaville-presentation/#commentsThu, 09 Jul 2015 10:22:27 +0000http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/?p=9570 Continue reading → ]]>This is the talk I gave at the FT/Alphaville conference in London last week. A number of people asked me to send the PPT to them, and I got buried in other work and the emails are long lost in my Gmail queue. So if you’d like to download the presentation file, please click here. My apologies to those correspondents to whom I haven’t replied directly.

]]>http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/09/will-we-crash-again-ftalphaville-presentation/feed/8Discussing Syriza’s stunning victory on the BBChttp://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/06/discussing-syrizas-stunning-victory-on-the-bbc/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/06/discussing-syrizas-stunning-victory-on-the-bbc/#commentsMon, 06 Jul 2015 06:40:30 +0000http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/?p=9567After yesterday’s remarkable victory in the Referendum, I was interviewed on the BBC News Channel. Someone has posted a recording from the BBC News Channel stream on YouTube.

]]>http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/06/discussing-syrizas-stunning-victory-on-the-bbc/feed/8Time To Play Hardball Yanishttp://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/06/time-to-play-hardball-yanis/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/06/time-to-play-hardball-yanis/#commentsSun, 05 Jul 2015 21:53:31 +0000http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/?p=9565 Continue reading → ]]>The Greek referendum has delivered a stunning victory for Syriza and its anti-austerity message. Despite the banks being closed as a result of the ECB limiting its provision of banknotes, and despite a united chorus of European leaders warning of dire consequences if the No vote succeeded, the Greeks have voted No in overwhelming numbers. The final result looks likely to be a 62% No to 38% Yes rejection of the Troika’s terms. Syriza now has overwhelming support from the Greek people to oppose the Troika (a result that opinion polls got completely wrong).

]]>http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/06/time-to-play-hardball-yanis/feed/7Talking Greece on the BBC & CNBChttp://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/04/talking-greece-on-the-bbc-cnbc/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/04/talking-greece-on-the-bbc-cnbc/#commentsSat, 04 Jul 2015 07:46:05 +0000http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/?p=9561I was interviewed on the BBC News Channel on Tuesday about the Greek crisis (see below) and I will be part of a CNBC panel “Squawk Box Special – Greece Decides” discussing the referendum results live as they roll in, from 8.30-9pm London time on Sunday.

]]>http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/04/talking-greece-on-the-bbc-cnbc/feed/0The Greek Votehttp://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/03/the-greek-vote/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/03/the-greek-vote/#commentsFri, 03 Jul 2015 06:20:34 +0000http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/?p=9559 Continue reading → ]]>There is an adage in politics that you should never put anything to the vote unless you are sure of the outcome beforehand. On that front, the referendum Greeks will vote in this Sunday is a mistake, because the vote could go either way. If the majority votes No, as Syriza hopes, then it—hopefully—will strengthen its hand in future negotiations with the Troika. But if the majority votes Yes, then Syriza will have to capitulate to the Troika and accept its unbending policy of austerity.

]]>http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/07/03/the-greek-vote/feed/2Bureaucrazies Versus Democracyhttp://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/06/28/bureaucrazies-versus-democracy/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/06/28/bureaucrazies-versus-democracy/#commentsSun, 28 Jun 2015 08:58:00 +0000http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/?p=9557 Continue reading → ]]>The most recent of the almost daily “Greek Crises” has made one thing clear: the Troika of the IMF, the EU and the ECB is out to break the government of Greece. There is no other way to interpret their refusal to accept the Greek’s latest proposal, which accepted huge government surpluses of 1% of GDP in 2015 and 2% in 2016, imposed VAT increases, and further cut pensions which are already below the poverty line for almost half of Greece’s pensioners. Instead, though the Greeks offered cuts effectively worth €8 billion, they wanted different cuts worth €11 billion.

]]>http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/06/28/bureaucrazies-versus-democracy/feed/5Are Surpluses Normal?http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/06/19/are-surpluses-normal/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/06/19/are-surpluses-normal/#commentsThu, 18 Jun 2015 16:10:08 +0000http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/?p=9554 Continue reading → ]]>England’s Chancellor George Osborne took the Conservative Party’s claim to fiscal responsibility one step higher last week when he announced that they will enact a law which will require British governments to run surpluses “in normal times”: